Since 2008, I've been using Opera as my main web browser. There were a few things I couldn't do on it - a few websites checked which browser you were using and stoutly refused to go any further if you were using Opera. For the main, it had a light memory footprint, was fast, had tabs and speeddials (which was relatively novel in 2008), and was high on standards compliance.
Yesterday, the PHP group announced the first stable release of PHP 5.5. This is great news. I shall compile it very shortly so that it can optionally be used on this server. That will allow me to test my various Drupal sites against PHP 5.5, to see if there are any issues.
However the arrival of PHP 5.5 signals the imminent end of PHP 5.3. Back in December 2012, PHP announced that
I just got a call. The caller display showed "international". The accent was foreign.
Operator: "Hello, this is N calling from the technical department of Windows Computer Systems. Could I speak to the main user please."
Me: "I'm sorry, there is no company called Windows Computer Systems."
Operator: {Silence}
Me: "It doesn't exist. Where did you say you were calling from?"
Operator: {Hangs up}
Drupal websites don't always need to allow users to register themselves with an account. This site doesn't, for instance. Anonymous commenting is turned on. The contact form is enabled for anonymous users. And those are the only thing that any member of the public would need to do - other than read. So nobody needs to set themselves up with a login.
I've used the services of Pingdom for a long time to keep track of how my websites are loading. They will check any website from ten different servers around the world, as often as once a minute. You can look at graphs of how the load time varies with time, and you can be notified as soon as the site goes down.
David Allen, in Getting Things Done (paid link), has lots of very useful tips on how to keep on top of all the things that need to be done. I don't think you need to adopt his method in an all-or-nothing way, although if taken as a whole approach there is a consistency that lends itself. Even then, you have to work out how you will put the principles into practice.
This blog has posts on a number of themes, and this one is technology related; for the rest of you, I shall see you later on. If you don't understand the title of this post, then it's probably not written with you in mind!
I've posted a couple of times before about the Mollom service I use to filter comments and e-mails from this site for potential spam.
Lately, the spam on this site has gone just crazy. Happily, Mollom has caught it all - I've not had one get through.
In case you can't see the numbers on the graph, here's how it's gone:
Regular visitors to this site will notice that the layout has changed a little.
That's all that many of you will want to know. Those of you who are technically minded, however, may wish to read on.
The site is developed with Drupal. Drupal is currently on version 7, and the first release of version 7 was on January 5th 2011. That's 15 months ago. Drupal 6 is still fully supported, and will remain so until the final release of Drupal 8 (12-18 months away - probably). There's therefore no rush to upgrade a site from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.
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